Crisis Point: Extinction 2023 Public Demo
Weekly Update! 1-10-2021 (Crystal Shot, sounds and scripts, personal update)
(The following is (mostly) a copy-paste from our weekly public update post on Patreon! If you like what you see, consider supporting us!)
Hey everyone! Hope you're all doing well. This was another stressful week in the real world, big shocker there. I'm not going to lie about it, it definitely had an effect on my productivity, but there's some good news regarding that that I'll get into in a bit!
First off, this is the last reminder that you can get v0.42 (our latest update) for free right now on itch.io! At the end of today, the download will be removed, so get it while you can!
With that reminder out of the way, on to the update. The only visual I have for ya this week is the gif up above, showing off another new bullet type: the Crystal Shot. Like with the Sawblade Shot last week, the visuals are still WIP, so it should look a bit nicer once the update is out.
The Crystal Shot is a high-investment, high-reward type of chip. As you can see from the gif, when you shoot an enemy with the Crystal Shot, it sticks into them, though it deals no damage at all at this stage. Repeated shots to the same area of an enemy will cause the embedded crystal to grow larger, up to a maximum of about 10 shots. When the enemy is struck by either a Melee attack, or a Force Shot explosion, any crystals embedded in them will explode, dealing exponentially higher damage the larger the crystal is. At low levels, the Crystal Shot honestly doesn't do much damage at all; the burst starts at only 1 damage (the Basic Shot you start the game with is 2 damage, for comparison), but once you reach the maximum size, exploding the crystal deals a whopping 57 damage! Naturally, this function makes it not so useful for smaller, weaker enemies that are already killed in just a few hits, but it's a huge help when dealing with beefier boys like the Kertalus and Crystal Dragon.
Aside from that, this week I've spent most of my time addressing forums and feedback, and fixing reported bugs. The free release of v0.42 brought us a LOT of comments, and answering them took up lots of my time. The good news is that we got tons of great feedback and bug reports, and I've already fixed up a handful of problems! I also spent time finishing that list of sounds the game needs that I mentioned a while ago (along with recording references for everything), and sent that off to our sound guy. I'm also looking into some different methods of handling ingame text; right now, text is all hard-coded, and I want to switch over to an externally-loaded file to help facilitate translations in the future. I did some more writing, and I'll be sending scripts over to our voice actors very soon so they can record. I also made some alterations to the level design just before boss 3; lots of people have trouble finding out how to get there, so hopefully the edits will make it easier to figure out. Overall, it wasn't a very productive work week for me, and I apologize for that - getting back into the swing of things has been difficult. That being said..
Here's the good news I talked about. This is all more personal stuff, rather than CPE-specific, so if you don't care about that feel free to stop reading here!
With how insane everything is in the USA right now, my mental state hasn't been in a very good place, and I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that. Normally when things like this happen, I have a tendency to tuck myself away and isolate, not doing much of anything for a while. That's been the cause of a LOT of lackluster CPE updates; it's an incredibly unhealthy way to cope, and I'm getting tired of it, along with my horrible health, weight, and overall inconsistency in life. This week, along with the other members of our household (Puffernutter and Orexius), we made the commitment as a group to change things. We all got together and made a schedule for ourselves, including daily exercise, a cooking/cleaning plan, more consistent working hours, and more. This probably all sounds like super obvious stuff to people who have their shit together better than I do, but for me it's a big step.
It's only been a few days since we started, but we've stuck to it, and honestly, things are already starting to change. My mental state is improving, exercise is still hard but I'm able to push it a bit more every day, work productivity has increased dramatically with more consistent work hours (before we would all work at different hours, whatever suited us best, now we have set office hours where everyone is productive).. really makes me wonder why it's so hard to get yourself to start. Regardless, I'm very excited to see where this new schedule takes me this year.
To anyone else reading this who struggles with similar things - join me! Use this as your opportunity to turn things around. Fuck the concept of a New Years Resolution, those never work out, just do what you can every day. Hopefully, we'll all come out of the other side better off for it.
Comments
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I guess I never commented on the free release because I didn't have anything negative to say about it. It was really good! And I pretty much always have feedback for people...
The only thing I would like to see improved would be the weapon system. It all feels the same to me, without any meaningful differences. I like the idea of being able to perfectly customize your weapon, but once you have the mod you want, you aren't really incentivized to change (and the basic blaster is my favorite). The only other type I use is the auto-targeting one for specific enemies that are hard to get a straight shot against. That being said, the weapon mods have gotten progressively better, and I can definitely see myself using the crystal blaster. The system doesn't hurt the game in any way, and it would probably be an absurd amount of work to redo it, but it does feel like untapped potential to me. If I was making it and could do whatever I want, I would either remove mods and just have different unique weapons, or make the weapon/mod system into a branching skill-tree with different paths and tradeoffs to choose. If I were to try and alter the current system, I would try and make the firing pattern mods more exciting, focusing on how the bullet reaches its target and its damage, and then have the type mods focus on how the bullets act after they hit. Wow, that was very long... hopefully it makes sense, sorry for blabbering, and this isn't a complaint; just spewing out ideas because I love the game so much already.
Is the last remaining two upgrades not implemented into the game yet? I feel like I've done everything there is to do in this 0.42 version but Idk there could be something that I missed.
Crystal shot kind of reminds me of the needler from halo. Loved that gun, and this seems like a nice spin into its own thing. Best of luck with the exercise and mental health.
I hope you feel better <3
I loved the game